Overthinking Things: 5,000 Words About One Stupid Episode Of The West Wing

Aaron Sorkin delivers the worst civics lesson in history.

The TV Shows Where Learning Is The Appeal

It’s not its own genre, really, but there is a certain type of film and TV show where the appeal is entirely wrapped up in the fact that it teaches you something. I don’t mean in a documentary sense where that is explicitly the appeal, I don’t mean in a didactic John Oliver sense, where a person just tells you what to believe. I also don’t mean in a direct “this is a well-researched movie about firefighters, and by watching it, I am learning what it is like to fight fires” way. I mean things like the show BILLIONS.

BILLIONS is about people who work in finance, and it’s probably totally wrong about what working in finance is really like, but the characters talk in references such that their conversations resemble hitting the random page button on wikipedia and after watching an episode, you can feel like, “wow, I hate these characters, and I wish they were all killed in a mass shooting but in watching them buzz around each other like autistic Hofstra undergrads I have probably picked up some random Snapple facts about Bruce Springsteen’s favorite strip club” or whatever.

The King of this type of writing is Aaron Sorkin.

Let me start by saying I am not an Aaron Sorkin hater. The next 5,000 words are going to make you think I hate Aaron Sorkin, so I want to be clear upfront that that isn’t the case. In fact, for many years, I would have described myself as a pure, uncut Aaron Sorkin fan. That is no longer true. Now I think he’s a bit hit & miss. And in retrospect, a lot of things I once loved, I think, are pretty flawed. But he is a straight-out wonderful playwright. I don’t mean you need to have read his plays to appreciate it. I mean, he’s a playwright in the sense that even his movies and TV shows are plays. He’s great at writing scenes of dialogue. He sets them up and knocks them down. And his dialogue schtick, while a schtick, is good schtick. It’s fun to watch his insufferable, self-righteous characters blather back and forth in repetitive ways as though some woke LLM was told to stylize David Mamet.

Sometimes it doesn’t work. Sometimes the actors don’t know how to perform it. Sometimes the directors don’t know how to direct it. Sometimes Sorkin himself goes too far into his own ass and is just too preachy and annoying. But a lot of times it works.

The Sorkin Formula

Aaron Sorkin loves to do little info dumps by characters randomly and unnecessarily one-upping each other with fun facts they learned from a novelty calendar.

Fact-a-day calendars are fun and neat!

Unfortunately, this calendar is not a serious calendar. This is a novelty hoax calendar. This is a calendar that needs a Community Note.